Verbatim quote · from the corpus

“But the key attitude that presides over the emission of the sign is not some Sartrian celebration of liberty; it is resentment . Each fears to become the target of the resentment of the others, and the ultimate resolution that leads to a satisfactorily peaceful solution is that the central being itself becomes the object of the resentment of all. The sparagmos is a “feeding frenzy,” but it is also an act of revenge on the animal that had acquired from the group the strength to prevent, for a time, any individual participant from touching it. The same prevalence of resentment applies to the life of primitive egalitarian societies. Field anthropologists remark on the frequency of murder and other forms of violence in these societies, of spells cast on neighbors and long-lasting feuds. We need ever so often to disabuse ourselves of Rousseau’s idyllic portrayal of la société commencée in order to recall that human equality exists more as a state whose absence we resent and any deviation from which to our detriment excites our anger, than as a shared experience of communal bliss. The ritual repetition of the originary event in the context of a festive celebration reinforces the community’s “solidarity” precisely by drowning out our everyday resentment in the egalitarian excess of the festivities; this experience is as real today as it was among our earliest ancestors.”

— Eric Gans, The Last Shall Be the First: Two Reflections · Saturday, January 6th, 2018 · Chronicles of Love & Resentment